David R. Loy is a Buddhist scholar-practitioner who, in addition to more scholarly titles, has also authored books intended for general audiences. This is one of those books, and it's a gem. It's short at only 128 pages, but it's packed with genuinely thought-provoking insights. Loy's text consists of a large number of quotes from a wide variety of sources: contemporary and historical, famous and obscure, scriptural and profane, and a variety of cultural traditions. But this book is not simply a collection of thought-provoking quotes gathered at random from a wide variety of sources. Loy interspaces his quotes with his questions and commentary. Indeed, the quotes serve more to adorn his commentary than vice versa. But the book works so well because of the deft interweaving of Loy's thoughts with those whom he quotes. Loy's text lends itself to brief quotation as well, as I demonstrate below. But taken together, Loy's text provides a compelling argument, a compelling story about stories.
Below I'll share a series of quotes that I've lifted from Loy's text as he lifted from others. As those he's quoted, there's no doubt more said before and after the quotes that round out the thought and may be usefully persued. But brevity provides fertile seed with which one can grow one's own thinking as well. Here's a sample of Loy's text, primarily as it relates to story, although this isn't the sole topic that he touches upon. Enjoy:
If the world is made of stories, stories are not just stories. They teach us what is real, what is valuable, and what is possible. Without stories there is no way to engage with the world because there is no world, and no one to engage with it because there is no self.
This is not to deny (or assert) that there is a world apart from our stories, only that we cannot understand anything without storying it. To understand is to story.
The limits of my stories are the limits of my world.
Science is not primarily about discovering facts. It is about accounting for the relationships that make them meaningful.
Stories do not have sharp edges. They never begin at the beginning.
A story is a point of view is no perspectiveless perspective. There is no way to escape perspectives except by multiplying them.
We transcend this world by being able to story it differently.
The metaphorical nature of religious language makes its truth claims the most difficult to evaluate, because we cannot agree on what criteria to use. Myth avoids this problem by being meaningful in a different way. Religious doctrines, like other ideologies, entail propositional claims to be accepted. Myths provide stories to interact with.
One of the most dangerous myths is the myth of a life without myth, the story of a realist who is freed himself from all that nonsense.
Liberation from myth, is that our myth?
Another way to evaluate a story is by its consequences when we live according to it. The most important criterion for Buddhism is whether a story promotes awakening.
My character is constructed by the roles I play.
If one's personality is composed of sub-personalities, each of us is composed of multiple narratives.
The question is not so much “What do I learn from stories?” as quotes "What stories do I want to live?"
Happens when I realize that my story is a story?
One meaning of freedom is the opportunity to act out of the story I identify with. Another freedom is the ability to change stories and my role within them. I move from scripted character to co-author of my own life. A third type of freedom results from understanding how stories construct and constrict my possibilities.
Whether or not karma is an unfathomable moral law built into the cosmos, living a story has consequences.
Without stories there is no self. And letting go of all stories during samadhi meditation I become no-thing. What can be said about nothing? Neti, neti, “not this, not this.” To say anything about it gives it a role in a story, even if only as a place-marker like a zero.
Am I the storyteller, or the storytold . . . or both? If a sense of self is produced by stories, who is telling them?
Descartes accounts for the continuity of awareness, Hume for its transformations. A narrative self—self as story—bridges the two, providing both sameness and difference. Essential to this narrative is intentionality. It is not enough to have a story about what happens. It is necessary to story why I do what I do.
A narrative understanding of the self implies a distinction between two aspects. One’s character composed of dispositions solidified out of roles that have become habitual. This is my identity, from the Latin identidem, which means “over and over.”
The other aspect of self preserves the possibility of novelty, of doing and become something different. This is my no-thing-ness. Identify is relatively fixed. No-thing-ness is that which cannot be fixed.
Myth as history, history as myth. Premodern people lived in a mythic world, how much of our own history is mythological? Although the past makes us what we are, what we have become determines what we will be able to see in our history.
A profusion of stories is liberating yet uncomfortable, because we want to tuck ourselves securely into the True Story, the one that reveals the way things really are and what’s really important.
The story of history as the history of story.
We are trying to fill up the hole at our core—the sense that something is missing, that I am not real enough—by becoming more wealthy, famous, attractive . . . more powerful. Power—the ability to impose my stories—offers the promise of reality. How could I be unreal, if I'm the one who decides what happens?
The Buddha, like Socrates and Jesus, wrote nothing.
Having learned to find meaning in words, we miss the meaning of everything else.
Our deepest fear is rooted in a compulsion to secure what cannot be secured.
The end of a life organized around fear is to forget your stories about yourself, and thereby your self.
We never achieve a neutral standpoint outside all stories from which to evaluate them objectively.
Those who do not care for such Big Stories [Buddhism, Christianity, etc.] need to consider the alternative. There is no such thing as not storying. Everybody stories. The only choice we get is how to story.
The best stories are paradoxical, one hand offering what the other takes back.
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